Video producers have very different needs than videographers, grips, electricians, and other crew, who also have kit bags.

Producers are devoted to organization and economy. The better organized a producer is, the better he or she can keep a production within budget. If you’re a producer, you need a producer’s kit bag. Or several.

Also, I have found that even the best crew needs some support. That’s why you’ll find everything from work gloves to batteries in the list below. If I don’t need them, perhaps someone on your set will. And the faster a need is met … the less time and money you’ve spent. (more…)

Machine learning is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Every time we talk to our smartphones, search for images or ask for restaurant recommendations, we are interacting with machine learning algorithms. They take as input large amounts of raw data, like the entire text of an encyclopedia, or the entire archives of a newspaper, and analyze the information to extract patterns that might not be visible to human analysts. But when these large data sets include social bias, the machines learn that too.

A machine learning algorithm is like a newborn baby that has been given millions of books to read without being taught the alphabet or knowing any words or (more…)

Given that we see the world through two small, flat retinae at the backs of our eyes, it seems remarkable that what each of us perceives is a seamless, three-dimensional visual world.

The retinae respond to various wavelengths of light from the world around us. But that’s just the first part of the process. Our brains have to do a lot of work with all that raw data that comes in – stitching it all together, choosing what to concentrate on and what to ignore. It’s the brain that constructs our visual world. (more…)